


Blunt Force

by taylor_tut



Category: MASH (TV)
Genre: Concussions, Gen, Head Injury, Headaches & Migraines, Sickfic, Whump, hawkeye whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-23
Updated: 2019-01-23
Packaged: 2019-10-14 23:48:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,906
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17518160
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/taylor_tut/pseuds/taylor_tut
Summary: A little request from my tumblr for Hawkeye being injured helping patients and trying to push through it! I chose a concussion.





	Blunt Force

Hawkeye had been crouching down to assess a patient in triage a moment ago, about to call to the nurse that he wasn’t urgently injured and that he could wait so long as they staunched the bleeding—or maybe he’d already said that: he couldn’t quite remember—when he’d felt the hard, unforgiving impact of the wooden dowels of a stretcher strike him in the back of the head, and the next thing he was aware of was being flat on his back, blinking up at the too-bright sun with a killer headache. 

“That’s why we don’t carry stretchers without a partner, even if they’re empty!” Potter was scolding, far too loudly, in Pierce’s opinion. The young soldier was apologizing profusely, but, funnily enough, Hawkeye didn’t think that he was saying it to him. His suspicions were confirmed when the Colonel chastized, “don’t tell me; tell the doctor you just hit in the head!” 

“I’m so sorry, Captain,” the soldier said, turning his attention to Pierce and offering him a hand up. Hawkeye took it, closing his eyes as the world spun rapidly in front of his eyes for a moment. 

“Happens to the best of us,” he mumbled, forcing himself to his feet, where he swayed dizzily into the soldier, who scrambled to steady him. 

“Are you alright?” he asked. Hawkeye knew that got the attention of the other doctors in the vicinity, even if they didn’t look up from what they were doing. 

“Fine; my brain just got knocked a little loose,” he quipped, finally managing to get his feet under him. “Don’t worry about me; I’m good. Go, bring more wounded.” The kid hurried away back to the ambulance and Hawkeye forced his vision to focus back on the patient in front of him. Apparently, he hadn’t told the nurse where to send the man, and now he couldn’t really remember himself where he was supposed to put him. 

“Hawkeye, you already looked that patient over,” Potter snapped, sounding irritable but really probably just feeling concerned. “How hard did you hit your head?”

It was throbbing, Hawkeye wanted to say, but since he wasn’t convinced that the hit had been hard enough to concuss him and they still had a lot of work ahead of them, he elected to forgo that explanation. 

“I’m fine, just got distracted. This one’s fine; he can wait a few hours. Clean him up and give him some antibiotics for the wound until we can get him into surgery,” he said to the nurse, who nodded and began to get to work on his commands. Next patient. Had he been making his way from the back of the line to the front, or the front to the back? He couldn’t quite remember, but when he looked to BJ for a hint, all he got was a disapproving frown. 

“Your head is bleeding,” BJ noted. Hawkeye reached around to feel the wound and found that indeed it was: his hand came away with a little red on the palm. 

“Not too badly,” he dismissed. “It’s just a cut, and that’s the worst of it. Nothing worth fussing over.”

“Who’s fussing?” BJ asked, pointing to the next patient that Hawkeye should tend to and turning his attention back to his own. He gave a few short commands to a nurse before jumping to the next patient and continuing. “I’m just saying head wounds can be serious. You should get an x-ray to make sure there’s no fracture.”

Hawkeye rolled his eyes, which made his head throb in a way that he thought it probably shouldn’t, but he wasn’t about to let that slow the entire OR down now. 

“If it still hurts in a few hours, then I will,” he reassured, “but for now, I think these kids have bigger problems. As much as he hated it, BJ couldn’t argue with that. 

“Just let someone know if you think it’s getting worse, yeah?” 

Hawkeye agreed to that without really listening, already wrapped up in his next patient. 

 

Two hours into surgery, Hawkeye had just finished his first patient of the batch and his head was killing him. The pain was dull but intense, throbbing in nature and unrelenting. It wasn’t seeming to get any better, but since he was having a hard time remembering how much pain he’d just been in from minute to minute, he couldn’t say with any confidence that it was getting worse, either. Either way, he couldn’t wait to be done with this, but they were far from finished. 

“Hawk, how’re you doing?” BJ asked when he noticed that his first patient was being taken away so that he could start round two. Hawkeye gave him a simple gloved thumbs-up, which satisfied BJ but not the Colonel. 

“You’ve been quiet, Hawkeye,” he pointed out. “How’s that noggin?” 

“Peachy, Colonel,” Hawkeye replied in a manner so sarcastic that he didn’t think it could legally count as a lie.

“Are you sure?” Potter pressed. “You got hit pretty hard.”

“Pierce was hit in the head?” Charles interjected. “By what?”

“Stretcher,” BJ replied, talking about him as if he weren’t right there. “Knocked him clean out and his head’s bleeding, but he won’t let me get an x-ray.” 

“I’ll get it later, Beej,” he borderline snapped. “I’m a little busy right now.” 

“Someone’s cranky.”

“I maintain the right to be,” Hawkeye shot back. “I’ll whine as much as I please until we’re out of this hellhole.”

“It’s the fact that you’re NOT whining that’s concerning,” Potter said. “You’ve barely said a word.”

Hawkeye sighed. He was having a hard enough time trying to focus beyond the pounding in his head without all this conversation, let alone trying to argue. He muttered something about focusing and got back to work and thankfully, the others did, too. After another hour and a half, his next patient was stable enough to be moved to post-op from a surgery that would normally have taken him an hour. The nurses were being patient—even at his worst, Hawkeye was faster than most, but most of them had definitely gotten used to a certain pace, and watching him move so slowly was not only frustrating, but threatened lives. Apparently, somehow, BJ had noticed, too, because as soon as Hawkeye was looking at an empty table waiting for a patient transfer, he was asking questions. 

“Talk to us, Hawkeye,” he called, not able to look up from his own surgery. “We’re starting to get worried. I think we should do a concussion check.”

“Alright,” Hawkeye agreed, “concussion: check. Now what?” He didn’t particularly want to start on a new surgery, and he was beginning to doubt his ability to do at all, but Charles was speaking to him, 

“—getting off that easily, Pierce,” he was warning. “You’re responsible for patients, and we’re responsible for you. What day of the week is it?” 

Hawkeye had to think about that for a moment. The days all tended to run together here, but he decided to trust his gut and take a guess. 

“Wednesday?” he asked, and he couldn’t tell if that was right, because Charles was already moving on.

“And of what year?” That one was easy.

“1951,” he replied. 

Charles seemed satisfied enough. “And what procedure did you perform on your last patient?” 

At that, he fumbled. 

“I, uh… well, I just took the shrapnel out and sewed him up.” The room went silent and tense. 

“What did you take shrapnel out of?” BJ asked, and Hawkeye frowned at the fact that he genuinely didn’t remember.

“A soldier,” he assumed was a safe answer, but it was not. They were concerned; they were pressing; they were moving in. 

“What part of the body?” Charles asserted, and Hawkeye couldn’t reply; the pressure in his head was too much. He stumbled away from the table in a semi-stupor and ungloved one hand so he could press it to his eye. Apparently, the table he’d fallen into was the one Charles was working at, because that was who came around the side to steady him. 

“Sorry,” Hawkeye apologized uncharacteristically sincerely. He knew he’d messed up and he didn’t want anyone else to have to pick up the slack, but God, his head was throbbing. 

“Perhaps you should get that head x-ray sooner rather than later,” Charles suggested, and even if Hawkeye had disagreed, he’d have been outnumbered. He allowed himself to be ushered out of the OR by a nurse, and after that, he didn’t remember much.

 

Hawkeye next became alert in post-op. However, rahter than startling awake in a chair and scolding himself for having dozed off, as per usual, this time, he was in a bed. Margaret was on duty and was the first one to notice when he opened his eyes.

“Hawkeye is awake,” she said softly, shaking BJ’s shoulder from a dead sleep against his own bed. Surprisingly, Charles was the first person to come over to him, meaning that BJ was not on duty at all and had slept sitting up against his bed becuase he was worried, not because he was required. Damn.

“The gang’s all here,” Hawkeye tried to diffuse, gesturing to the whole crowd that surrounded him. 

“How’re you feeling, Hawk?” BJ was the first to ask. He reached out a hand to touch his forehead, which was devoid of heat. It really was just the stupid stretcher. 

“I’m okay,” he promised, eliciting a scoff from Charles. 

“You also said that mere seconds before you collapsed into my arms like a damsel in surgery,” he pointed out, which sounded fair if it were true. He suspected from Charles’ face that it probably was.

“You’re lucky your skull wasn’t fractured,” BJ said. “You’re concussed, that’s for sure. You collapsed on OR, Hawk. That hit to the head was harder than you thought. You really got your bell rung.”

“I don’t remember much after performing my first surgery,” Hawkeye said as a weak defense. 

“Not surprising,” Charles countered. “You were positively punch-drunk by the time you finally got your x-ray.” He reached over to Hawkeye’s chart and read over it, skimming for when he’d last received pain medication and finding that it had been a while. “Are you in pain?”

Hawkeye shrugged. “Just a headache,” he replied, which could mean anything from ‘no, not at all, I’d just very much like to complain about what happened to me’ to ‘if there were a God, he’d put me out of my misery,’ depending on the situation, but given the moment, Charles chose to let it go. 

“Let someone know when you need more medication,” he said.

BJ scoffed. “Yeah, just like he ‘let us know’ when he needed his head x-rayed. I say sedate him.”

Hawkeye frowned. “Hey now,” he objected, not having much more of an argument to put up. Luckily, he was finding that he was very tired, and that was probably an excuse enough to get out of this conversation. He struggled to keep his eyes open until BJ rolled his. 

“Alright, fine. Go to sleep. You’re getting yelled at for this at some point, so you might as well be well-rested.” Despite the pain, Hawkeye laughed at that, allowing his eyes to fall closed with their blessing. If everyone was here with him, that meant that they probably had it handled, so he could probably have a nap without killing anyone. 


End file.
